Academic Exercises: Short stories

 

 Glimmer Train #47 (2003) A journal of short stories founded Linda Swanson-Davies and her sister, Susan Burmeister-Brown, appearing from 1990 to 2011. I can’t recall how I came by this copy. I didn’t read all the stories, though I sampled every one. The author bios almost all mention a BFA or similar academic qualifications, which makes it a sample of what University writing programs produce. My take: Interesting, but by and large too self-consciously “engaged” with whatever theses the authors could derive from their tales. Carefully constructed, they attempt to give meaning to the lives of ordinary people caught in the web of ordinary life.
     But too often, you see the cogs being carefully assembled into a gear-train, and the crank beginning to churn the contraption. Too often, I didn’t want to know more about the characters than the first few paragraphs told me. Too often, the near total avoidance of plot (ie, of the intersection between a character’s decisions and the random events that make up reality) meant I didn’t want to know what happened next, let alone how the characters coped with it. For even if life is a tale told by an idiot, the sound and fury do signify.
     The first story The Accident, or the Embrace is one of two stories that took me into their world. Beginning with an accident in which a boy loses his leg, it ends with a discreet menage a trois (so discreet, it’s unclear if the husband knows he’s part of it). Midnight Bowling is told by a girl who manages to escape her mother’s plans for a religious life with her new man (married, hence adulterous, but a self-proclaimed Christian). She hides her intentions from her mother, and hides a good deal of what she know or suspects from the reader, who must tease together the few bits of the puzzle that suggest what’s missing from explicit telling.
     The collection’s interesting as much for what it reveals about the esthetic and craft standards of academic writing programs as for the tales themselves. I felt the writers knew what they wanted to achieve, but didn’t know why it might be worth achieving. Entertainment? Demonstration of narrative skill? Revelation of some overlooked aspect of being human? I can’t tell. They wrote good stories, but not memorable ones. **